US President Donald Trump has unleashed a blistering attack on the FBI’s leadership, even as he praised state and local police officers as a crucial defence against rising violence and crime.

Mr Trump denounced the bureau for its handling of the Hillary Clinton email investigation, calling it “really disgraceful” and continuing his questioning of his country’s intelligence and law enforcement institutions as no president before.

“We’re going to rebuild the FBI, it’ll be bigger and better than ever, but it is very sad when you look at those documents, and how they’ve done that is really, really disgraceful, and you have a lot of very angry people that are seeing it.” …

“There is extreme bias against this president with high-up members of the team there at the FBI who were investigating Hillary Clinton at the time,” Mr Gidley said, as Mr Mueller pushed on with a probe of possible Trump campaign ties to Russia.